The year was 1912 when 50 members of the Victoria Automobile Club formed an advocacy group to promote a wild idea. As vast and far-flung as Canada is, they reckoned, it deserves a highway to run uninterrupted from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Clearly, as early adopters of the private vehicle, they were rather chuffed, so maybe we can forgive them their naïveté regarding the magnitude of that dream. Perhaps they had never visited the mountains of B.C. and Alberta, nor were they familiar with the glacial creep of federal-provincial negotiations when the subject is who pays for what. Yet they confidently told reporters that, audacious as it was, such a task could be finished within five years.

As history proves, they were only off by a factor of 10. It wouldn’t be until September 1962 that Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker finally stood at the summit of Rogers Pass and declared the Trans-Canada Highway (TCH) open for business and adventure. He made no mention of the fact that, nation-wide, there was still at least 3,000 kilometres of the route yet to be paved, and couldn’t have known that it would take another full decade to achieve that. Instead, last-spike style, The Chief tamped some asphalt into a ceremonial hole in the road. “Boys,” he likely said, “it looks like our work here is done.”

Meanwhile, strings of motionless traffic had coagulated on both sides of the pass, a harbinger of things to come. Surely those motorists muttered an expression that would become an everyday mantra for those brought to an unforeseen halt on this uber-wild stretch of highway: “What the hell’s going on now?”

Apart from those who call places like Revelstoke and Salmon Arm home, plus long-haul truckers, it is Calgarians for whom the mountainous stretch of the TCH is most vital. We are a wandering breed, and since our vacation compasses point west at a disproportionate rate, we have come to view the TCH as our road, our gateway to temperate climes, deep-snow skiing, lake life and, if we’re lucky, only occasional bouts of abject terror.

Therefore, if you recently found yourself slowly traversing the construction-dotted TCH—or worse, suffering through one of its, on average, 64 unplanned closures per year—your heart may have skipped a beat upon spying the B.C. government signs trumpeting tax dollars at work in what reads like a latter-day miracle: “Kamloops to Alberta Four-laning Program.”

Seriously? Is this something that could actually occur in our lifetime?

Spoiler alert: Be prepared to live a long time yet.

“Well, anything is possible,” says Jennifer Fraser when asked that question. As the Kelowna-based director of the TCH Four-laning program for B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, her remit is some 220 kilometres of the TCH (outside of the national parks) yet to be twinned. Whereas she acknowledges that no target date for completion currently exists, she points out that the government, including the recently elected NDP version, has given a high priority to the job. The only problem is how massively, nearly unimaginably, complicated that job turns out to be.

Fraser is fond of using an analogy she calls “the funnel” to characterize the long process of narrowing down seemingly endless possibilities to precisely codified construction. “At the top of the funnel,” she says, “we base everything on three concepts: safety, mobility and reliability. We then start considering everything that currently exists. Which sections are crash-prone. Where locally generated congestion is worst. The state of structures like bridges. What the public thinks.” The list goes on and on.

It’s only after an already exhaustive study of needs and possibilities that secondary planning begins, a process involving what Fraser calls a hybrid team of public and private consultants. But that only identifies potential project stretches and arrives at preliminary cost estimates. Still further down the funnel comes the procurement stage, when provincial and federal funds are finally haggled over and earmarked. Only after that does real, non-hypothetical planning begin. It can then take years for the amount of forest clearance, rock removal, fluvial mitigation and cleanup that must occur during the brutally short mountain construction season. On top of everything else, says Fraser, “The TCH is a road that absolutely has to operate as near as possible to 24/7 during the entire process. In summer that means about 15,000 vehicles a day need to get through.” There’s a commercial imperative as well; 10 per cent of that traffic is transport trucks, a proportion that increases to 30 per cent in winter.

It should perhaps go without saying that if you want to be in the road construction business in pristine mountain environments, you had better enjoy meetings. “Those who manage these projects have a huge job just keeping track of stakeholders—from highway users to First Nations bands to everyone who lives at the side of the road,” says Rob Parkinson, transportation special projects manager with McElhanney Consulting Services of Vancouver. Parkinson’s specialty is civil engineering, and he notes that on any given project there can be as many as six or seven separate consulting companies, from geotechnical to structural to environmental. It’s the latter, he says, which usually requires the longest period of study and thus contributes enormously to what he calls, quite simply “the most difficult area for road-building in all of North America.”

There’s no better evidence for that than the project B.C. announced just last winter: eliminating a notorious bottleneck by replacing the final four kilometres of undivided road in the Kicking Horse Canyon east of Golden. Both tortuous and torturous, the route is a magnet for accidents. It also represents a critical example of a situation found frequently along the TCH: a highway clinging to rock above both the CPR tracks and a turbulent river. It will require a complex system of bridges, retaining walls and rock catchment ditches, with construction currently slated to begin in 2019. The work is expected to take five years and will cost over $100 million per kilometre, making it the most expensive road in B.C. history. Compare that to a 20-kilometre stretch of twinning west of Golden announced at the same time. Though still hemmed in by river and rail, that segment is a bargain at a mere million-per-kilometre.

Meanwhile, many well-travelled Canadians ask, for example, why we don’t build sexy Swiss-style double-decker highways, or tunnels, or long, cantilevered highways bridging dramatic cliffs. Parkinson points out that such structures are invariably underwritten by sky-high tolls, and again, they’re in parts of the world that have nearby alternative routes and can therefore be shut down for months at a time.

Slow and incremental the TCH’s improvements may be, but it’s worth reminding ourselves how much better things are now compared to the recent past. Strategically inserted passing lanes, for example, have shaved an hour or more off a Calgary-to-Vancouver trip. For that matter, veteran drivers will recall when all travel to the Rockies took place on a sluggish, two-lane highway, a situation only remedied in the 1960s to help buttress Banff’s 1972 Winter Olympics bid.

What quickly became clear was the atrocious level of vehicle-wildlife collisions, making comprehensive fencing the only immediate solution—except, that is, for eliminating all highways from the national parks, as some environmentalists advocated. Although that turned out to be a political non-starter, Parks Canada’s mandate to aggressively mitigate every form of human intrusion has only grown over the years, as terms like “wildlife corridors” and “connectivity” entered public parlance. No wonder it has become such a notoriously strict steward of the natural realm; it had to.

As Calgary-based engineer and consultant Terry McGuire puts it, “Parks Canada is not a transport agency.” Working now as TCH twinning project co-ordinator for the mountain zone, he has helped guide the highway-nature mitigation process for more than three decades. “It was pretty difficult back in the pre-internet age,” McGuire recalls of the early years of wildlife migration research. “We were slowly trading documents by mail, and (along with wardens and scientists) going to Europe and the U.S. to find out everything we could.” Even with that, when overhead wildlife crossings were first built just east of Banff, now a quarter-century ago, whether they were being used wasn’t all that clear. Now there’s 15 years of solid research that not only confirms that the crossings work, it helps refine the requirements with every new structure. “In the 88-kilometre stretch west of Canmore there are now 48 wildlife crossings, both over and under the road,” says McGuire proudly. The crossings accommodate both aquatic and terrestrial species. “In Banff it’s bears and ungulates. As you move westward, it’s wolverines, mountain sheep and goats. There are some major salt licks in Yoho, and those animals need access.”

One of McGuire’s recent projects is the difficult, wind-scoured six-kilometre stretch just past the B.C. border, due for completion next spring. Because the footprint must be as small as possible, the four lanes have only a narrow divider instead of a median. That required the feat of building a 60-metre-wide animal crossing with only one arch across all four lanes. Their next challenge will be the twisting 44-kilometre stretch to Field and beyond. That’s the area where the CPR has the luxury of the original 1886 spiral tunnel, just as it uses a 1916 tunnel under Rogers Pass that avalanche closures had quickly taught them was essential.

Indeed, the country’s deepest snowfalls form a backdrop to every calculation by highway engineers. “There are 144 avalanche paths above the road in the Rogers Pass area alone,” McGuire says. With around 10 metres of snow falling per year at highway level, and as much as double that in the alpine, avalanches represent the principal cause of winter closures. “A lot of these paths we’ve had to bomb from helicopters, but if those can’t fly during major snow events, we have to shut the highway down and wait it out.” There’s good news, however, in a high-tech solution that promises to reduce highway closures. In the start zones of numerous avalanche paths, Parks Canada has been recently installing Gazex systems. These involve remote sensing of the snow accumulation and special pipes to deliver a propane-powered blast to the snowpack in order to trigger avalanches before they achieve catastrophic dimensions. Says McGuire, “To be able to do that remotely will definitely make a difference.”

Other than that, and waiting for projects to trickle down the funnel and, some decade, get finished, life on the TCH figures to carry on much as before. As winter settles in, we’ll once again anxiously consult road reports and weather forecasts before strapping into the sport utility for another six to eight hours of TCH roulette. The goal is to not become one of the 500-odd collisions that occur each year on the Kamloops-to-Alberta stretch. But nothing is ever guaranteed during whiteouts or after dark, with its persistent condition wherein road sand has painted the panorama from ditch to ditch in headlight-absorbing brown, with no road markings to be seen.

One positive development has been in critical stretches where there are now embedded devices which accurately sense road conditions like black ice, and will adjust the speed limit accordingly using electronic signage—solar-powered, to be sure. Wiring the national parks for electricity is not in the cards. For the time being, neither are cellphone towers.

At some point, of course, we all have to do our part. People need to keep their vehicles in top shape, and remember that B.C. now has mandatory snow-tire regulations. That has to help. Most of all, though, we need to throttle back, grip the wheel a tiny bit looser, and enjoy spectacular scenery that people pay dearly to come see. As that sign says with every other blink, SOYEZ PRUDENT.

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